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You seem to be making a normative statement, that journalism should be making editorial decisions in order to nudge toward the outcome they believe is correct (or that some societal watchdog believes is correct?) rather than what's normally considered the goal of detached and dispassionate reporting.



Did you read the original BMJ article? It was not detached and dispassionate reporting. That's the problem. It was alarmist and blew the issue way out of proportion because it lacked appropriate context.

The only mitigating information they gave was that the company only conducted trials on 1,000 out of 44,000 enrolled patients. But that was buried 10 paragraphs in.

There was no neutral party evaluation of the seriousness of the errors.

There was no neutral party evaluation of the implication of the errors on the soundness of the study.

There was no mention of the obvious effectiveness and safety of the vaccine.

In short, it did lack context and it should have been obvious to the BMJ that it would be inflammatory fodder for the anti-vax movement. It should have been nixed and rewritten to frame the errors in a more, as you say, detached and dispassionate way.


Who is the journalist here?




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